When your emotions are not validated, you feel neglected.

I still remember the time when my class monitor cheated in class. I felt it is unfair and I told my mom that I wanted to tell my teacher about it. But my mom just told me not to stir trouble and spoil the relationship I had with the class monitor.

When I had difficulties in my secondary school and I didn’t get along with my classmates, I told my dad that I wanted to change school. But instead of hearing me out, he told me that my older brother is doing well in the same school and questioned why I can’t do the same.

When I was a teen, I tried to show my dad my point of view. But I soon realized that my voice is never going to be heard in the family. He is only going to see things from his perspectives, so I give up sharing my thoughts with him.

What Is Childhood Emotional Neglect?

According to Dr. Jonice Webb, the author of Running on Empty, emotional neglect is a parent’s failure to respond enough to a child’s emotional needs.

As children, you probably have tried to express your needs, but your needs are often ignored. Of course, your parents can’t give you everything. However, most children just want their voice to be heard and their parents to listen to them.

Do I really need to tell my teacher about the misdoing of my class monitor? Do I really need to change my secondary school? Absolutely not! What I needed from my parents was to acknowledge how I feel and make the effort to understand me. I would have felt loved and understood if they had taken the time to listen to what I had to say.

The Invisible Hurt

Childhood emotional neglect is not the same as abuse.

Children who were abused are more able to see and feel their physical and emotional wounds because abuse occurs when someone did something to you. It’s visible.

For children who felt neglected, they might not even be as in touch with their emotional wounds because it isn’t caused by an action. It is caused by a non-action. It is triggered by the parent’s failure to act. The hurt is invisible and often overlooked.

Neglected children often don’t understand why we feel disconnected with others and unloved. When our parents are cold and distant or don’t pay enough attention to us, we are left to wonder if there is something wrong with us. Why don’t our parents love and care about us? So many of us grow up with low self-esteem.

Absent Parents

Apart from emotional validation and affirmation, some parents are not there with their children, to begin with. They are busy with work and absent from most of their children’s life. Or they might be physically there but thinking about something else while talking to their children.

Often, I see kids on the train wanting to tell their parents something exciting they saw, but the parents just ignore them and continue to use their mobile phone. Realizing the parents are not there, these children end up talking to themselves.

Children felt neglected when their parents aren’t present.

Another form of neglect is when parents let their children do whatever they want. They don’t provide any guidance, discipline or structure to their kids. Even though on the surface, it might seem that the parents give their children a lot of freedom. But this might also make the children feel that their parents don’t care about them enough and they are left to fend for themselves.

I have a friend who wishes that his parents would tell him what to do and what not to do when he was younger. He wouldn’t have made the mistakes he made in life if his parents provided some guidance.

3 Kinds of Emotional Deprivation

In the book, Reinventing Your Life, the authors sum it up very nicely with these three kinds of deprivation that a child might experience:

Deprivation of nurturance: When your parents don’t provide you with enough warmth, attention, and physical attention as a child.

Deprivation of protection: When your parents don’t provide you with strength, direction, and guidance.

In this blog post, we focus on the deprivation of empathy. Let’s see how can we tell if we are neglected emotionally as a child.

Signs that You Are Neglected Emotionally as a Child

1. You feel that no one truly understands you.

There are two folds to this. First, your parents didn’t take the time to listen to you and make you feel understood, so you grew up believing that other people would not understand you too.

Second, you don’t make enough effort to share about yourself since you subconsciously believe that other people won’t be able to or aren’t interested to understand you.

You don’t want to feel the same disappointment you had as a child.

So in the end, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Due to your lack of communication, people don’t get the chance to know you and that makes you feel even more disconnected with others. Even when you are in a relationship with someone, you will still feel lonely and unloved because you don’t tell your partner what you need or how you feel.

2. You feel that you don’t matter.

People who are neglected have low self-esteem, but they might not be as self-critical as others who have low self-esteem. Instead, they might feel invisible, numb or empty, and have this lingering feeling that they don’t matter.

You learned to neglect our needs since young.

When your parents don’t fulfill your emotional needs as a child, you develop this belief that you are unimportant. You have difficulties expressing your needs in adulthood, not just because you fear disappointment. It’s because you are so used to thinking that your needs are unimportant that youdon’t know what your needs are.

You often find yourself having an abundance of empathy and compassion for others, but not so much for yourself. Some of us are accommodating and don’t have many preferences because we pay more attention to other people than ourselves.

Sometimes, we also feel uncomfortable to accept a favor from others or ask for help since deep down inside, we feel that our needs don’t matter.

3. You have people-pleasing tendencies.

When you are neglected emotionally as a kid, you develop a skill to please others. Not only did you learn that your needs are not important, you believe that other people’s needs like your parents are more important than yours.

Neglected children are trained to please their parents.

I didn’t get much emotional support from my parents. But what I didn’t understand then was my parents don’t know how to handle their own emotions too and are constantly looking for other people like their children to appease their own emotional needs.

Many times, I had to obey them and sacrifice my needs to maintain the peace in the family. My parents would get upset, angry, or worried if I didn’t do what they wanted. This is not that different from a child throwing a tantrum in the toy stores when he couldn’t get what he wanted. Sometimes, it felt as though I had to babysit them.

It’s always about how our parents feel, not what we feel. Therefore, neglected children learn to be more in tune with other people’s needs than they own. Many of us also developed this habit of pleasing others because we don’t want others to feel neglected as we do.

4. You have difficulties identifying and expressing your emotions.

The irony with neglected children is that they understand other people’s feelings and needs very well, but they don’t understand their own.

For example, I have difficulties understanding some of my emotions, especially anger. When I had depression, I suppressed my anger. But the thing is I didn’t even know I was feeling angry. It wasn’t until when things got a lot worse later that I was able to see how angry I was with the situation.

Our parents don’t acknowledge our emotions often enough because our emotions make them feel uncomfortable. So we learn to suppress our feelings and deny them. We think that we are not allowed or capable of being emotional.

You might also have hidden resentment for your parents.

When our emotional needs aren’t fulfilled and we are tired of being the ones taking care of our parents’ emotional needs, we might have resentment for our parents. We feel that our parents are preventing us from getting our needs met and we have to forgo our needs to meet their needs. This hidden desire to get our needs met causes us to resent our parents and sometimes other people too, especially when we don’t express our desires regularly.

How to Overcome Childhood Emotional Neglect?

1. Acknowledge your own needs and emotions.

Understanding your needs is not easy for someone who is neglected. You might not know your preferences, boundaries, and values well enough.

To have a better understanding of your needs, set aside a time each day to reflect on your feelings and be true to whatever feelings that arise. Anger and resentment are actually your best friends in this scenario because they tell you that you have unmet needs. So learn to accept both the positive and negative feelings.

Write down and test out your needs.

A good practice is to write down what your needs are and test them out. Get to the core of it. If something makes you unhappy, examine why. Don’t dismiss the feeling. Check if similar situations make you unhappy too.

As we tend to have people pleasing behaviors, writing down our needs will also remind us of our needs too. So that we don’t lose ourselves while trying to help someone.

2. Know that your needs are important too.

To overcome childhood emotional neglect, you have to unlearn the belief that you are unimportant. Your needs are just as important as your parents’ and everyone else.

Sometimes, you have to let others deal with their own emotions when their needs conflict with yours.

Allow other people to deal with their own emotions.

If they are angry and upset with you, let them be angry and upset with you. You can’t be there to take care of their emotions all the time. Let them take responsibility for their own emotions.

Until today, my dad is still puzzled and somewhat frustrated with me because I don’t want to be an accountant or a manager. He can’t figure out why I don’t want a stable job or be in a position of power. I can’t help him manage his emotions and expectations. He has to learn how to accept a point of view that is different from his. If I were to listen to him, I would have to sacrifice my own needs. Then, I would end up resenting him and myself. This is not what I want for our relationship.

3. Learn to assert and express yourself.

People who felt neglected in childhood find it difficult to assert themselves and express their needs. We are afraid that other people will not respect or acknowledge our needs when we express them. We are also afraid that others will judge or mock us as too needy or clingy.

But assertiveness is an essential life skill. You have to learn to communicate your needs despite the risks of being invalidated and rejected. It’s better to let other people understand how you feel than pretending everything is okay. Some will respond to your needs and others won’t. For those people who don’t, decide how to deal with them later. Always communicate first.

You can assert yourself without being aggressive.

Sometimes, we don’t want to assert ourselves because we don’t want to be in conflict with others and ruin our existing relationship with them. But not letting the other party know what you need might make the relationship worse since you are not being authentic with your feelings and the other person.

We can assert ourselves calmly without being aggressive. When you do it the first few times, there might be some aggression and that is understandable. Finetune the process and find the right words to say. With practice, you will get better at it.

4. Find friends that are willing to listen to you.

There are many types of friends. Some friends are people who you enjoy doing the same activities with. Some friends are people you meet at work and in your school. Others are those who you can share your knowledge and discuss topics intellectually.

It’s important for people who were neglected emotionally in childhood to make friends who we can be vulnerable to and pour our hearts out. Being deprived of emotional validation for so long, we need someone who is empathetic and non-judgmental enough to hear us talk about our problems. We need someone who can trust our feelings with, not just someone who gives us advice.

Realize that not everyone can fulfill your needs.

It’s not ideal to share your feelings with friends who are uncomfortable in dealing with emotions themselves. Some friends just want to do things with you together. Expecting someone to do something they can’t, will just make you feel disappointed. Growing up, I figured that my parents are never the type that will spend the time to understand my emotions, so I stopped hoping and expecting them to do so.

Each friend serves a different purpose and we need a variety of friends. It’s also wise to find several friends which you can connect on a deeper level and not just rely on one person.

5. Always be the one to care for your emotional needs.

There will be times when your empathetic friends are busy and not available. There will be times when your spouse or partner can’t fulfill your emotional needs and needed time alone.

Instead of always depending on your friends or partner, learn to be your own best friend. This is part of being self-compassion. Be there for yourself. When you need attention and love, reach out to the little boy or little girl inside of you and tell him or her:

“I care for you. I’m here for you.”

There is nothing more rewarding than being present with yourself. Alternatively, you can find other methods to express your emotions. In my case, writing blog posts on this website is important to me. Not only because I enjoy sharing my insights and helping others, it’s a medium for me to express thoughts that I might not be able to express completely in my daily life.

You can also journal, sing, watch sentimental movies, create or do anything that helps you express your emotions. It doesn’t have to involve another person.